DELEGATES gathering for the last conference of the National Union of Teachers will have a number of chances to celebrate the extraordinary history of a union that has been centre stage in public life for all of 147 years.

They will receive a copy of a popular pictorial history entitled Pride, Passion, Professionalism: The NUT and the Struggle for Education 1870-2017.

Though written by author and activist Martin Cloake, this history draws on a collaboration between colleagues with a variety of skills. But then how could a history of the main teachers’ union not be based on working together?

It tells the story of a union formed by just 100 delegates and a volunteer general secretary in June 1870.

In the words of its first president, JJ Graves, the union was “convinced that by the elevation of the teacher, we elevate the value of education and accelerate the progress of civilisation.”

The principle that “what’s good for teachers is good for pupils,” and vice versa, has guided the NUT ever since.

Professionalism and trade unionism would henceforth not be opposites. The two elements would intersect and create a unique combination such that, when times were hard, the union could use its knowledge and practice to shape education, often through political action.

And in good times, it would drive the organisation on through campaigning and industrial action, such that by the end its membership numbered 330,000 and had a presence in nearly every school in England and Wales.

The union brought this powerful combination to bear to weaken bad legislation and strengthen good. It played an organised and focused role in the struggle to shape the key education Acts of 1870, 1902, 1944 and 1988 and other legislation.

Whereas it was arguably at its most powerful in 1944, it was not able to neuter the destructive impact of the 1988 Baker Act, which allowed primary and secondary schools to opt out of local authority control and be funded by central government.

In many ways, this Act sought to reverse the trajectory of 1944, and efforts to block its negative aspects have shaped the struggle for education over the last three decades.

It is rare that an organisation lays itself open to critical scrutiny in the form of a written history; the last one about the NUT was written in 1970.

But although this is a popular pictorial account, it is not a hagiography. For the first time, it relates the story of those teachers and members, such as Minnie Lansbury, who sacrificed so much for the suffragette cause.

Likewise, with the threat of fascism looming, some enrolled in the International Brigades and fought in the Spanish civil war, among them Bill Alexander, the commander of the British Battalion who went on to become a chemistry teacher and NUT member.

It tells for the first time the story of the teachers who became London recruits to the underground struggle against apartheid, taking personal risks to fight white minority rule in South Africa.

In the course of those 147 years, the union witnessed the Boer war, lost many members in the killing fields of France and Belgium during World War I, produced some of its best activists in the combined struggle for trade unionism, women’s suffrage and equal pay, played a contradictory role during the general strike and shaped education policy that resulted in the 1944 Act.

The union then began the struggle for comprehensive education and increased pay and professionalism, achieving a graduate-entry profession and, along the way, affiliating to the TUC in 1972. Some readers may be surprised that this came so late.

Since the 1988 Act, and the high point of Thatcher’s rule, the union has never wavered. It has campaigned tirelessly against the break-up of education and its privatisation, as well as against the Global Education Reform Movement, a radically reactionary programme of rolling back social gains through education on a global scale.

But all through its history, the union has been at its best when it has asserted, campaigned for and negotiated positive alternatives.

Its influence has been felt industrially and politically, especially during last year’s general election when hundreds of thousands of voters changed their previous habits and put their cross by the name of the Labour candidate out of concern at school funding cuts. It was an issue that the union made a talking point in many households and every community.

As project co-ordinator, I am only too aware of the many amazing characters, events and outcomes, especially of local campaigns, that simply could not be included because of the space limitations. Our hope is that the records of the union are more systematically gathered so that further histories can be written.

There is a fantastic story of women’s struggle for equal pay and suffrage waiting to be set down.

Two episodes that did make it in, and which I believe will change the way that members look at their union, took place in 1939-40 and in 1966.

At the outbreak of war, teachers were charged with organising the removal of children from urban centres, so that they could be safely relocated and their schooling continued despite the threat of bombing.

Over a single weekend, in what is still the biggest ever movement of people in British history, teachers organised the evacuation of three million children without a single fatality. Most were back at school the following week.

And in 1966, the small pit village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales, was the scene of the biggest peacetime disaster in education when an entirely preventable slippage of coal slurry slammed into a school, killing five teachers and 109 pupils. The response of the NUT was immediate, it was social unionism at its most effective, and it rescued a little bit of humanity from the callous disregard of employer and government.

When all the events, personages and structural changes that affect a union over such a long period have been absorbed, one might ask whether there is a single element that takes pride of place.

If there has to be one, it can be found in the closing words of the author when he writes of the NUT having, “another perspective, one that recognises the enduring strength of the basic ideas of free education for all, social justice and solidarity.”

It is likely that, on the NUT’s passing into the National Education Union, its history will be revisited many times. Historians and writers will find few unions which have had the impact of the NUT or matched its sustained activism on a consistent set of core values.

In the words of Kevin Courtney, the last general secretary, “it’s a members’ history” because members make history. And long may that be so.

Phil Katz is the principal officer for communications and campaigns at the the National Union of Teachers and director of the union’s history project.